At Seatris, we see a lot of restaurants using social media but having no idea on how to truly benefit from it. Most of the time, mistakes are made from the lack of clear strategy. Indeed, social media are about a long-term vision to sustain your brand. We have noticed that many companies have become specialized in Marketing for restaurants, which is great.

However, we believe that you could manage most of these techniques yourself and save money on Marketing. In that sense, we have created a list of 5 easy techniques that you can use to boost your restaurant visibility and potentially acquire new guests.

1. Highlight your current guests and not yourself

It appears that most restaurants only talk about themselves on Facebook. You should not post only pictures about your dishes but instead talk about your guests, share their moment of happiness in your restaurant.

A lot of the content you need for this is already available on Instagram (People will most likely upload pictures of your restaurant and use your restaurants name as a hashtag "#"). It is a great way to build a community and show how your restaurant is about people and positive feelings.

2. Use contests and events

We see a lot of restaurants having many likes on their page but not interacting with them. One way to fix this issue is to rewards your fans for doing certain things (posting pictures, tagging a friend, etc.). The idea to run a contest is great since it will encourage people to interact with your brand and perhaps bring new people to your restaurant.

Remember that a page with many likes but no interaction is a waste, you have to seek interaction with your database. Do not be afraid to ask questions, give your opinion on social media. Your brand will only benefit from this.

3. Discover Facebook Ads

It appears that a vast majority of restaurant owners have no idea about how to run a campaign on Facebook. The idea is to promote your restaurant within a specific area (5/10 km around your restaurant) to people using Facebook. You could for instance run a campaign with a specific discount for people living nearby. A good way to attract local customers.

For your information, the average user spends 17 minutes a day on Facebook and at strategic moments during the day (before lunch,...).

4. Use videos !

We have seen many restaurants posting only pictures which is wrong. It has been proven that food topics get the most attention on Facebook and that videos can lead to a higher engagement rate with the content.

You should try to harness the power of videos to build your brand by sharing different moments inside your restaurant. People love exclusive content! but do not forget to use hashtags with this type of content to increase your potential reach (#Foodaddict, #restaurant, etc.)

5. Mention pages

Only a few restaurants use this technique but it can be highly strategic. When you are about to post something on Facebook, you can type the letter “@” and write the name of a company or group. That mention is likely to be seen by this company or fans of this page which will increase your reach and visibility. However, be careful to do it only when there is a logical reason to mention the other company/group.

For instance, you could mention a specific group who is about to celebrate an event and invite them to your restaurant.

We hope you enjoyed these easy techniques. Our goal at Seatris is to help build the successful restaurant of the future which for us is synonym of independent restaurant.